Re: Use of Microsoft Project for Production Planning

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Michael Thompson wrote:
Thanks Rob. That's what I thought. It's a pity though because the problem of resource planning/reporting is very much the same regardless of whether the resources are people or machines (or some combination) and regardless of whether the time units are months, days, minutes, or milliseconds.

My company does use a tool called Witness to model production work flows. Witness can also be used to animate the process (movement of pieces, humans, machinery, etc.). However, there are features in Microsoft Project that I thought might be beneficial if production planning could be done in Project without too much difficulty. That doesn't appear to be the case though.

Thanks again.

"Rob Schneider" wrote:

Michael Thompson wrote:
I am interested in using Microsoft Project to represent production plans. Specifically, I am interested in representing the flow of workpieces through a series of machine tools/processes. I am interested in tracking the utilization of the separate machines, human operators, materials, and other resources. The various charting and reporting provided by Project would be very helpful in order to optimize the process flow, identify bottlenecks, etc.

Unfortunately, I have not found this to be possible for at least two reasons:

1. Recurring tasks as implemented in Project do not represent true cyclic tasks as the cycle periods cannot be specified in any unit less than days. For example, a machine cycle time (duration) might be only 10-15 minutes and might repeat on a period of 30 minutes.

2. Task repetitions may need to be specified using advanced rules. For example, assume that I manufacture pieces in a continuous stream but choose to inspect only one part out of every five. That means that I will have an inspection task that should be triggered after every fifth part is machined.

I realize that Microsoft Project is a project planning tool and not a production workflow planning tool. However, it has many of the features needed to address production workflow planning. I am wondering if anyone else has tried to use it in this way an, if so, how did you go about overcoming the concerns noted above?




Project is not built for this, and all reports I've read here in recent years suggests that it's never been successful at doing what you suggest. I'm sure packages exist out there to do this; and if I had a choice of making Project work or programme something in some sort of simulation or other high level language--I'd go with the latter.


Michael,

I've heard of Witness, but know nothing. I know that the people who developed it come from an Operations Research background so it's probably a better match for your world. Don't know, though. You've inspired me to go look at their web site. (When I first heard of Witness and observed my colleagues using it, there was no World Wide Web).

Sounds like you might be on the leading edge. If you have some ideas and think it can be useful to you ... go for it. Just because there are few reports of success doesn't at all mean you can't have success.
.

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